Joel Littler

Research Topic

Asianism Without Nationalism: A Study of Thai-Japanese Intellectual Relations (1888-1922)

Supervisor: Professor Sho Konishi

I completed an MSc in Modern Japanese Studies at the Nissan Institute in 2017. I focused on Japanese Intellectual History, and wrote my dissertation on the making of an alternative religion in late-Meiji Japan. 

After the MSc I spent three years teaching at two leading universities in Thailand. From this experience I became interested in the little-known transnational links between Japan and Thailand in the late 19th century. Thailand, like Japan, was never colonised, and there are surprisingly few studies of Japan and Southeast Asia outside the schema of imperial aggression and colonisation. My examination of various nonstate actors from Japan, Thailand and beyond is part of a move to reorient the history of Japan and Southeast Asia away from empire, and towards the crucial attempts of transnational solidarity and cooperation of the time.